Which of these national disastors for America will go down in history as having the greatest impact?

My ranking: 9/11, JFK Assn, Pearl Harbor.

Reasons: 9/11 turned us into a paranoid nation. All out of porportion to the actual damage inflicted. 3000 casualties in no great shakes in historical terms.

JFK Assn ended thera era of innocence. The 1950s ended that day.

Pearl Harbor - USA would have entered World War 2 sooner or later anyway. Really didnt change anything.

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Pearl Harbor, and the fact that Germany declared war against the US two days later. It gave Roosevelt the political cover to go against his campaign pledge of staying out of the European war, which was a righteous war to involve ourselves. Britain was certainly strong enough to avoid invasion, but not strong enough to launch an offensive war against the Nazis. If the US were not to engage in that war, the entire world would be very different, and in a negative way. We'd be either a more fascist word, or a more communist world. I believe that Russia would have defeated Hitler, after Stalingrad.

9/11 certainly gave us pause to look at the amount of damage some chump change, in the hands of lunatics could cause. We've still yet to see what Bush's cowboyism in Iraq will cost us, but it certainly changed the power equation of the Middle East. On one hand we made Iran the 500 lb gorilla on the block, and on the other hand we alienated and radicalized the moderate element in that country. Long term it could be seen as brilliance or bone headed stupidity.

JFK's murder wound up giving us the opportunity to outlaw American apartheid. I suspect that we'd still be about 30 years behind, had not the outpouring of sympathy enabled Johnson to push through the 1964 civil rights laws.

The nation that put men on the Moon can't apply grade school Newtonian physics to airliners hitting skyscrapers.

There was nothing about Pearl Harbor that defied the laws of physics. What would happen if most of the world truly understood the the US went into Iraq and Afghanistan over a lie is unknowable.

The Empire State Building was completed 70 years before the WTC was destroyed but the US can't tell the world the tons of steel and tons of concrete that were on every level of the towers. Didn't they have to figure that out to make them hold themselves up? So how can anyone claim a scientific study was done without data that simple.

Duh, what is the conservation of momentum?

So how do we teach Newtonian physics for the next 1000 years?

Of course after NINE YEARS how many people would have to admit they were stupid if they now say airliners could not do it?

It was the ultimate victory for USSR's infiltration of the US and Japanese governments. Instead of working with Hitler and doing everything to keep the US out of the war, the Japanese attack at Pearl was strategically totally unnecessary, served no military purpose and only secured the long term victory for the USSR.

Had the Japanese been able to capture Hawaii, OK, maybe that's different. But that was never even the plan. So seriously what the fuck was the purpose? Yamamoto was 100% correct. Sticking a finger in the US eye at a time when may Americans had no interest in the war was not clever at all and the only reason the Japanese did it was on advise of Communists working in the Japanese government.

The Japanese knew they could not defeat the US, but their strategy was to capture as much earth as possible and make the Americans pay such a high price in trying to recapture in casualties the US would negotiate a peace plan. In the negoated Japan would end up with areas with needed resources.

JFK "an era of innocence"? Surely you jest. Why do people still imagine JFK as some sort of Camelot figure? The JFK assassination was a tragedy but the Kennedys were hardly a Brady family symbol of 50's innocence. In fact JFK was a depraved womanizer who associated with organized crime figures and he may have been addicted to pain killers for chronic back pain by a Dr. feelgood. His illegal raising of a little CIA trained invasion army and abandoning them at the Bay of Pigs and his inept leadership led the U.S. into "Devcon 2" for the only time in history. Pearl Harbor was the most crucial event in history. It led to the U.S. involvement in WW2 and the ultimate deaths of tens of millions of civilians throughout the world.

Obviously Pearl Harbor is the best answer of the three. It brought home to most of America the hazards and increasing necessity of exerting power beyond its borders in a world growing increasingly smaller and smaller, and 'neutrality' was a fantasy that couldn't stand any longer. It started an American hegemony that has lasted over 70 years of relative peace, over an historical period that would either have kept generating world wars every decade, or created a far worse hegemonic power to fill the vacuum, despite all the fashionable pop sociology and neurotic sniveling going on today by the assorted wing nuts on the left and the right.

The JFK assassination didn't really do much to change anything, outside of the shock it may have caused to Suburbanites and their sensibilities. I agree that the Camelot Myth is a little ridiculous and the JFK has been grossly over-rated by the family's PR machine.

9/11 is just another case of some foreign fanatics provoking what one Japanese Admiral referred to as 'awakening a sleeping giant' again; it is in no way comparable to Pearl Harbor, however, as the U.S. already had allies and bases overseas, and it required nothing in the way of developing capabilities we didn't already have, which of course is a direct result of Pearl.

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